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By Megan Harvey, Kate Martin & Margaret Robbins (mA history students)
Margaret Robbins For a month this spring, we were privileged to be the guests and students of the Stó:lõ—the Indigenous people who have made the Fraser River Valley and Fraser River Canyon their home for thousands of years.
From April 24 to May 22, we participated in the Ethnohistory Field School, based in Chilliwack, BC. It is a partnership of the University of Victoria, the University of Saskatchewan, the Stó:lõ Research and Resource Management Centre, Stó:lõ Nation and the Stó:lõ Tribal Council. Faculty coordinators for the field school are Drs. John Lutz (UVic) and Keith Carlson (USask).
Every second spring since 1998, graduate students and faculty from the two universities have been welcomed into Stó:lõ territory for the field school. This year, nine graduate students participated.
During our first week there, each of us boarded with a Stó:lõ family. We were given a tour of traditional territories; an introduction to Stó:lõ archives, staff and elders; and seminars on oral history techniques and protocol, ethnohistorical methods and approaches.
Megan Harvey and Kate Martin For the next three weeks, we lived together on the grounds of a former residential school. During this time, we worked together with Stó:lõ mentors, staff and elders on research projects that the Stó:lõ have identified as being important to them.
Margaret studied Stó:lõ stories of metaphysical tunnels which connect disparate parts of Stó:lõ territory. She helped document and map the tunnel stories in an effort to understand their significance and visualize the spiritual geography of the Stó:lõ and to illuminate Stó:lõ understandings of place and community.
Kate worked with the Stó:lõ to understand the impacts on individuals and the community of Bill C-31 (An Act to Amend the Indian Act, 1985), which allowed Stó:lõ women who had lost their status, as well as their children and grandchildren, to apply for recognition under the act.
Megan looked at ways the Stó:lõ have addressed settler governments around the “land question,” comparing petitions from Stó:lõ figures at the turn of the 20th century with the more recent treaty process. Her work could provide historical context for current-day treaty processes and relationships.
Our time at the field school was a transformative experience on several levels. We were received with a sincere generosity by everyone we encountered. Stó:lõ people expressed a very genuine willingness to engage with us and have us learn as much as possible while we were there. The number and variety of community events we were invited to witness is just one very memorable example of how we were made welcome. We were all deeply affected by this generosity, and it inspired a similar kind of feeling in us.
The field school was an incredible introduction to what grounded, community-based scholarly research can look like. It was a hands-on encounter across our cultural differences, and we learned first hand about our various points of convergence and divergence in a setting in which we were invited to participate in a meaningful—and useful—manner.
One of the things we will take away from the experience is a more sensitive awareness of the difference between reading histories and witnessing how people actually live their histories. While we all “live history” in some way, being in Stó:lõ territory and learning from Stó:lõ peoples about how they experience the past is quite different from reading about it in a book. The experience humbled us in important ways to what we couldn’t know without respectfully building relationships and learning how to listen in the ways needed in this particular context.
Listening to people talk about what in a more conventional academic arena could be framed as current and historical ‘issues’ or ‘events,’ we got a very strong sense of how history is a lived experience. Pre- and post-contact histories are living histories in Stó:lõ communities—they are part of peoples’ personal stories. It is a remarkable thing to have someone—whole communities even—share some of this with us as outsiders.
We also learned to work productively in a context that is not our own. Part of this meant learning how to behave, in the sense of protocol and manners—being conscious of how to listen and speak. We learned the basics in how to proceed respectfully in a cultural context that is largely unfamiliar to us as non-Indigenous students. Practicing oral history in Stó:lõ communities, for example, is not about rushing into an interview and having someone tell you everything. It takes time, and this is assumed. Implicit in this is a sense too that there is time, that there will be time to keep talking, to return and continue working in some capacity with the community, to keep building and reshaping the relationships we have begun.
While some of this seems a bit abstract, it is these larger impressions and feelings that will act in our work and in our lives from now on. The field school experience helped to transform the way we think about the role of relationships and community building in research.
A collection of the best Ethnohistory Field School research papers has been published in a peer reviewed on-line journal, The Research Review. More: www.ethnohist.ca
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